It’s time for the
Groundhog day trope. Honestly I find this worrisome that any show in its first
season is pulling a Trope show: Groundhog Day, bodyswap, musical or clip show:
usually it’s a sign of a scraping the bottom of the barrel of ideas.
On the plus side this
episode spends relatively little time actually going through the loops since
everyone remembers what’s going on pretty quickly and tries to figure out how
to break them. The minus side is that the show presents these loops in a weird order,
not beginning at the beginning of the loop means it takes a while to even piece
together the actual chronology of the loop.
But to tease it
apart:
Isaac is totally
happy with Cal killing the djinn last week but if Cal’s going to run off with
the weapon of last resort ring he should totally tell Isaac.
The demon mayor knows
something is going on so contacts Isaac since both of them are in the not quite
human category and Isaac is getting woo-woo headaches. Everyone else is feeling
more and more fatigue with each loop which will eventually leave them unable to
escape.
Things in the loop
happening: Tilly has a standard autopsy. Russ and Garvey grow closer together
and Bea decides to go through magic with them - introducing them to tarot. And
running a spread that happens to produce a series of devil cards when there’s
only supposed to be one which is ominous.
There are lots of
references to Aunt Nancy and spider webs crawling in everywhere
At the end of each
loop they find Aunt Nancy and the mayor has decided the best way to solve all
their problems is to kill Aunt Nancy with a Hindu lightning artefact. Each time
he arrives in time to kill someone random - Cal, May, Tilly - but none of which
actually stops the time loop resetting over and over. Aunt Nancy continues to
be insensible and staring at the memory crystal in front of her (we’ve seen
these before)
Not knowing what to
do, Cal accepts a deal with the Dredge in his ring - who guides him to destroy
that memory crystal and collapse the time loop and save everyone
Ok… I’m not convinced
they couldn’t have figured this out without a demon deal? I mean Anansi was in
a trance focused on the crystal and a clear source? Surely this looks…
suspicious? Maybe? Perhaps at least try before making deals with the most
powerful demon they’ve encountered? I feel like this was kind of convoluted to
force this deal along with a storyline which was cliched and clumsy and not
well executed.
I mean the acting was
excellent - there was a whole lot of emotion and fear and tension - it was
really well acted. But clumsily written, cliched and felt somewhat forced to
get to the deal storyline. Superstition is generally better than this.
